The U.N. on Meat, Ecology and Veganism

what I want to say in this video is
quite simple although I am having trouble saying it simply in politics very often one in the same institution is both the greatest supporter of a cause and at the same time its greatest attractor I can't even call this a paradox because it is so common and so widespread right now the United Nations a completely undemocratic institution that is spending taxpayers dollars with zero accountability nobody getting elected etc United Nations agencies are both the greatest proponents of ecologic causes and really their greatest enemies their greatest detractors we see this in the bizarre contradictions in statements made by the FAO FAO is the Food and Agriculture Organization it is now 2016 10 years ago in the year 2006 the FAO published a major report called livestock's long shadow I will provide a link below this video to that report if you take a look at that report you may be surprised you may be astonished to find that almost every single issue that vegans are still talking about today in terms of the connection between ecology and meat production is already talked about it is already substantiated with real facts with statistics with examples in that report from the United Nations 10 years ago now you may also be depressed by that fact because you have to ask yourself if this has been so well known and so well documented for 10 years why is it that nothing has been done now the irony is when you come to the conclusions of that report so you get a sort of long series of statements of principle facts explanations etc but when you come to the conclusion of the report it's the exact opposite of what vegans would endorse the FAO still this day is calling for increases in meat consumption worldwide and their recommendations are irreconcilable with the facts and concerns that they set out now totally lacking from that report is ethical consideration it's an environmental and partly economic meditation on the meat industry I'm gonna read one quotations very short quotation from the report here but if you just casually leaf through it you'll see what is shocking the extent to which things that are still news today even for vegans but things that are being promoted as new and shocking news was already so well established ten years ago quote in the United States livestock are responsible for an estimated 55% of erosion that's soil erosion 37% of pesticides being applied 50% of the volume of antibiotics consumed okay so just a pause or more antibiotics are being used for farm animals in total then for human animals even now I wonder think about that said I wonder if they're including fish probably not this is just referring to livestock it would be much more than 50% if they include the dumping of antibiotics forum fish that are formed in these contained areas 32% of the nitrogen load and 33% of the phosphorous load into freshwater resources so that's referring to a type of water pollution of dumping nitrogen and phosphorus into rivers lakes etc okay so just there you actually have a whole set of stats the report is full there's a lot more a whole set of stats that are separate from and different from what you most commonly hear quoted now which is we tend to just get the carbon dioxide number and we tend to just get water consumption numbers as opposed to water pollution they're all important they're all worth knowing about they're all worth thinking about here is the United Nations ten years ago giving this seemingly authoritative and respectable and scientifically validated report on all these issues I'll just close the paragraph that I was quoting although the effective load into freshwater resources is not assessed for sediments pesticides antibiotics heavy metals or biological contaminants livestock are likely to have a major role in these pollution processes these are yet more major major major ecological concerns associated with the meat industry but as I say paradoxically they advocate for and they really make their money out of the application of modern Western technologies factory farming as we say in short to third world countries that's really where the FAL gets its bread buttered whatever you want to say the FA owes budget and its raison d'etre its existence is justified by trying to share with third world countries the dubious advantages of imitating American and Western European methods of livestock production and so it's not surprising given that bias that their ultimate recommendations even within this same report the 2006 report livestock's long shadow the recommendations are for increasing meat agriculture for increasing the industrialization of meat agriculture in increasing efficiency and as I've mentioned before on this channel free-range is less efficient than factory farming in terms of the ecological efficiency the same things that make these pictures so horrifying of pigs living their whole life in a steel shed on a concrete floor being penned in an casian you know truly hell like imagery those things do make the meat industry more efficient in all these ways in terms of the amount of water consumed in terms of the amount of pollution it's absolutely immoral and terrible I'm not justifying it but I just say the FAO it's studies and then it's recommendations the guidelines come out of that ultimately reflect the economic logic of industrialization of supporting the greater intensification modernization of meat agriculture but ultimately what the what it boils down to is the Food and Agriculture Organization with all of his data at their disposal with all the signs of information not just given to them but really produced by them they produce original research gathered analyzed published what they are are suggesting is an increase of meat consumption to 20 grams of animal protein per day an increase now for very few countries in the world would that be an increase I shouldn't say for very few people as a percentage of the world's population that would be an increase in India you can look up Wikipedia as a good list of countries by meat consumption per capita that would be an increase for some poverty-stricken countries in Africa where their meat consumption is very low due to sheer poverty if you actually look at photographs on the internet I'll provide a link for that also of what 20 grams of meat protein looks like so this is meat protein in the sense of any animal source you can get 20 grams of protein out of just one container of yogurt so if someone followed these guidelines in the United States or Western Europe they would be completely vegan aside from eating one container of yogurt you get 20 grams of protein out of one modestly sized hamburger but again this is still not the standard American diet this is not what's normal in in Western Europe work got Eastern Europe look at how much meat they consumed in in the Slavic countries that would be eating one hamburger and then everything else in the day being vegan so if you've looked at the stats for what the standard American diet really is they're eating such enormous quantities of fat and protein from dairy sources cheese milk etc that for any for any Everidge American these guidelines would be a radical reduction in meat consumption not an increase but again the FAO completely undemocratic untransparent institution obviously there are some people of principle in the institution who are struggling to publish the logical and obvious conclusions that all of the data at their disposal point to and once every so many years they a report like this it's now been 10 years since livestock's long shadow maybe this year we're gonna see another report of this kind saying hey guys guess what this whole thing is fundamentally pretty crazy but the FAO does fundamentally exist to increase meat production so it's amazing they're able to overcome their own bias but one of the very sad things about the United Nations and to some extent EU organizations you know organizations for the European Union is that we tend to be reproducing all of the defects of democracy without the virtues of democracy mmm from my perspective you know one of the fundamental questions about war is not whether or not we choose to go to war but of who chooses I think it is definitely true that at the beginning of the Vietnam War a majority of Americans in a referendum would have approved of the war but after five years after 10 years after how many years would Americans still be approving of that war and with many of these United Nations programs many of them were created for reasons that made sense in the early 1950s what seemed in a transparent and honest and open way well this seemed like a good idea in 1952 to set up this agency to pursue these these objectives and so on but as the decades go by and their budget just increases and increases so on again you can look up this book Lords of poverty I can provide a link to that also it's a famous book dealing with the huge waste of money inefficiency corruption a lack of transparency and United Nations bodies you know these quasi governmental institutions lack the ability to be accountable to any sector of the public in any country much less is there something like a referendum now you may say obviously vegans are a very very small minority even vegetarians a very small minority in the world why would I raise this issue in this context well it's one thing to say the majority of people on earth meet because they do but it's another thing to say the majority of people who eat meat want to see their tax payers dollars being spent encouraging the expansion of factory farming they don't I honestly think the percentage of beef eating people in the world if you ask them hey do you mind if we tax you and then spend millions and millions of dollars increasing and imitating the most despicable forms of meat a grocer the vast majority meat eaters they give you these lame excuses about free-range and ethically harvesting and stuff they themselves can barely stand the sight of what this industry is and what it does do you want your tax dollars to be on a charitable basis expanding this industry and supporting the imitation of this industry the proliferation of this industry throughout third world countries that of course are even less capable of dealing with the knock-on impacts the environmental effects the loss of potable drinking water destruction of breathable air the increasing and really frightening rate of diseases that are resistant to any form of treatment due to totally irresponsible use of antibacterial agents problems going on so know there is a real question of democracy you may not be getting so many videos from me here on YouTube um today is the day that I happen to have hit 1000 subscribers as I've said previously I think about 200 people really regularly watch my videos in understand what I'm doing but for whatever reason my number of subscribers is now at 1,000 hello to everyone watching I want to give a shout out to a certain IRC chat forum it's incredibly rare that I find any forum for vegans to talk to other vegans that is not completely silent so in the description below this video that has so many links already I am going to give a link to that forum I just discovered it a few days ago I'm delighted to see it exists it reminds me of what the old internet used to be like the internet used to be a place where you could meet people and make friends that has gotten harder and harder to do obviously in some ways the Internet has blossomed it's become a better place to do online shopping and many other things but in that respect you know the Internet has become a less friendly place and it's become less functional in my opinion um on a strictly anonymous forum like Reddit you ain't gonna make any friends but that core function of socialization that as I've said in other videos can be the crucial first step towards real activism real political change this little forum is one of the few places where I've seen that going on so I'm going to provide a link to that and if you see someone with exactly my name with a body al all in lowercase with hyphens then that really is me because my nickname is registered however if the spelling is even slightly different then it's not me it's someone who's fake pretending to be me if there are capital letters in there then it's not me it's someone else pretending to me so it's only with that exact spelling capitalization you'll know you're talking to me